A key principle in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) communication systems is that the total operating bandwidth is divided into sub-carriers, also called resource blocks (RBs), where transmissions for user equipment (UE) occur in an orthogonal (i.e., not mutually interfering) manner. Each RB can potentially carry data to a different UE. The scheduler at the transmitter (also known as base station or Node B) selects the UEs to be scheduled in a given time period and also determines which RBs are used for each UE. By scheduling each UE on RBs where it has high signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) and by adapting the transmission data rate to the SINR on the scheduled RBs, the scheduler can improve the data throughput to each UE and therefore also the overall system throughput. To enable near-optimum frequency domain scheduling of UEs in the RBs of the operating bandwidth, each UE feeds back the channel quality indicator (CQI) metric it might potentially experience for each RB or some combination of RBs to its serving Node B. Improvements in the process of feeding back this information would prove beneficial in the art.